Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
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| Les Demoiselles d'Avignon |
| Pablo Picasso, 1907 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 243.9 × 233.7 cm, 96 × 92 in |
| Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon in English) is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel. Picasso painted it in France, and completed it in the summer of 1907. The eye-catching painting is one of Picasso's most famous. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which acquired it in 1939.[1]
Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism. Within the narrative of early modern art, it is widely held as a seminal work.[1] It has been argued that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.[2] Its resemblance to Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal was discussed by later commentators.
At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. André Salmon gave it its current name; Picasso had always called it Le Bordel.[3]
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[edit] Interpretations
Picasso drew each of the figures differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp geometric shapes. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. The masks seem to be derived from African tribal masks. Maurice Vlaminck is often credited with having introduced Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.[4]
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, this style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.[1]
In 1974, however, critic Leo Steinberg in his landmark essay "The Philosophical Brothel" posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches, which were completely ignored by most critics, he argues that, far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.[1]
The earliest sketches of the work actually feature two men inside the brothel, one a sailor and the other a medical student (often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori, a reminder of death). A trace of their presence at a table in the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg argues, has come to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history with women. A world of meanings then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to use a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.[1]
According to Steinberg, the reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, as well as the idea of the self-possessed woman, no longer there solely for the pleasure of the male gaze, may be traced back to Manet's "Olympia" of 1863.[1]
The 1994 book Les Demoiselles D'Avignon by William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins is an in-depth analysis of the work and its genesis. Rubin suggests that some of the figure's faces symbolize the disfigurements of syphilis, and that the painting was created following a series of brothel visits by Picasso, who was then temporarily separated from his mistress Fernande Olivier. Rubin interprets the painting as expressing the artist's atheism, his willingness to risk anarchy for freedom, his fear of disease and illness, and, most forcefully, 'his deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and ecstatic idealization of it.'[5]
In 2004 an episode of the BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece featured Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. It reported that Picasso denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art, never heard of it." Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting, during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero, about which he later said "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things."[3][6]
[edit] Reputation and influence
In July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page, four-column article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of art of the last 100 years".[7]
Luis Gispert's Señoritas Suicidio (2005) is a modern reinterpretation of Picasso's work, a photograph showing five suicide girls in poses very similar to those of Picasso's models, photographed as they emerge from a swimming pool.[8]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f Steinberg, L. "The Philosophical Brothel." October, no. 44. (spring 1988): 7–74.
- ^ Hilton Kramer, "Reflections on Matisse", The New Criterion, November 1992, p. 5
- ^ a b The Private Life of a Masterpiece, Series 3, Episode 9. BBC. Episode synopsis
- ^ Art of the Avant-Gardes. Edwards, Steve and Wood, Paul. page 162
- ^ Julia Frey, Anatomy of a Masterpiece, The New York Times, 30 April 1995
- ^ A magical encounter at the root of modern art, The Economist, 9 February 2006
- ^ Plagens, Peter. Which Is the Most Influential Work of Art of the Last 100 Years?, Art, Newsweek, July 2/July 9, 2007, p. 68-69
- ^ Gispert, Luis (artist). Senoritas Suicidio (contemporary photograph: 127 x 218 inches/322.6 x 553.7 cm), Saatchi Gallery Collection, ArtNet.com, 2005, retrieved on: August 5, 2007
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